" S OME ONE'S missing here. It's Sartre." The author of "Being and Nothingness" heard this cry re- sounding from earth to hea ven when, as a boy, he da y- dreamed of rescuing maidens in the desert from mustachioed bandits. How he got to be "missing" (and longing, vainly, to be missed) is the subject of "The Words" ( Braziller; translated by Bernard Frechtman), Sartre's ac- count of his first dozen years. The hero of this history constantly absents himself behind a series of masquerades. In his desert fantasy, young] ean-Paul would " h O d h " d b 0 pus aSI e t e screen an, urstIng into view, send heads rolling with his sabre. In real life, making himself present was not that easy. It reqlllred unceasing struggle to get around the illusory egos that kept forming them- sel ves in the gaps of his being. This spectral struggle has occupied most of Sartre's life "The Words" IS a nega- tive autobiography, a natural history of the not-selves that crystallized in the time span of the living person and dIs- placed him. Given the current interest in alienation, no theme could be more timely. Sartre's father died when] ean-Paul was a few months old; the circum- stance of havIng a father unknown to him was responsible, he believes, for the clots of emptiness in his personality. In choosing his son's vocation, a father instills in him a sense of purpose. Sartre's father died too soon to be able to give a directing shove to the future of his offspring. He failed, too, to leave him an inheritance that might have established between them the contInu- ity of thIngs. Thus Sartre's identity was deprived of gravity and left bobbing on the air currents of other people's opin- ions of him. "A father," he reflects, "would have weighted me with a cer- tain stable obstinacy." Luck (both good and bad) pro- vided him, from his earliest days, with a dedicated audience. "Rather than the son of a dead man, I was given to un- derstand that I was a child of miracle." Having lost her husband, his youthful mother returned with her infant to the home of her parents, the Schweitzers. The pet of Papa Charles Schweitzer, uncle of the celebrated Albert, Sartre grew up in an environment of middle- class refinement and conceIt. The small ,. .......... :' BOOK5 From Play-Acting to Self outsIder quickly learns how to win ap- plause by palming himself off as a cultural asset. Having no incentive to do, he performs. His mother, once more fallen under the parental system, is like an older sIster who coddles him and coaches the act he puts on as the family star. His grandfather dotes on hIm and eagerly connives in deceptIons calcu- lated to prove hImself the ancestor of a prodigy. ("\'That he worshipped in me was his generosity.") Sartre's childish utterances are read as oracles; he elicits wonder through deliberate fabrications of nonsense. The little hipster aims to please and finds "nothIng more amus- ing than to play at being good." At the age of four, he is an accomplished co- medIan who "never cries and hardly laughs." Later, having taught himself to read, he delights himself in solitude with juvenile thriller magazines while he continues to dravl gasps in the draw- ing room with his pretended devotion to the classics. This double life is summed up in "The Words" with the force of a proposition of Descartes: "I led two lives, both of them untrue." Short, growing up unhandsome, Sar- jY , \. ) '\ _ ...-x --- ,.. ! . - -- -.- - ... ',"".! ::;'v - 131 tre found In language the chief mate- rials for his impostures and his self- substitutions. Through words, the "little faker" put himself in the spot- light that gilded his "uncalled-for" life. In words, too, he discovered a universe that matched his own immaterIality and that he could enjoy at will and even control. The encyclopedia surrounded him with plants, butterflies, and heroes; actual creatures would remain crude approximations of those first met on the page. \Vithout friends or antagonists, the phrase-made darling gesticulated in a setting of labels. "The \V ords" does not hesitate to confess that the wish "to live in the ether among the aerial simu- lacra of Things" infl uenced Sartre's later political conceptions. In the fan- tasy world of reading he encountered a semi-fabulous personage, The Great W riter, whose image was to rule his own life. To the child, an author and his books were one: Corneille had a leather back; this gave him the added merit of substantiality. Becoming a writer himself was with Sartre a new and powerful means of showing off for his claque-"above all, I wrote because $ f " ^. " "';'..., I Î i <tæÆ) ((No, Margaret, I don't think we should 51t down together and take inventory.l think we should sit down together and watch television."